Federal Government, Justice Department, Say Seattle Police are Bad Outliers
But Sara Nelson and The Seattle City Council Oppose Police Accountability
Two Of These Things Belong Together…
The Justice department says SPD is one of the most misbehaved departments in the country.
A world renowned expert says the Seattle Police Department’s use of munitions in crowd control is unprecedented in a democracy.
But Sara Nelson and the Seattle City Council just took a step to prevent police accountability.
Nelson Says No To Accountable Policing
Sara Nelson promised good governance, but just led the city council in a step to prevent basic police accountability. Their plan? Keep the Office of Police Accountability from becoming independent from the Seattle Police Department.
Independent oversight is a hallmark of good governance, policing or otherwise. Any attorney can tell you oversight isn’t real when it isn’t independent. Imagine punishing your middle schooler but giving them a veto over any punishment you choose. This is the Nelson model.
Accountability Matters
Given that we empower police, more than almost anyone else, to use physical and lethal force to do their jobs, independent oversight is especially important. This is a minimum for any democratic society that recognizes basic civil and human rights.
Most Seattle residents, including me, want a well-staffed police force. But we expect them to be professional, responsive, and deeply respectful of civil rights. We want officers who are skilled at de-escalation, and avoid disproportionate policing of marginalized communities. And we want to hold bad actors accountable.
There is no path to this kind of healthy policing without rigorous, independent oversight.
Given that the City is negotiating our labor contract with SPD, this is a worrisome harbinger of what may be coming.
Unreality
Sara Nelson’s and the council’s support for this bizarre back-the-blue-no-matter-what-they-do approach is out of touch with Seattle’s values and frankly, basic principles of a democratic society.
It also ignores the fact that the Seattle Police Department has a long and embarrassing reputation for unusually bad behavior.
While politicians like Nelson and the lobbyists that support their low tax agenda will try to waive away these concerns with vague statements about “defund,” these problems go back much farther and have been acknowledged by independent experts and Republican and Democratic Presidential administrations.
As an example, Seattle Police Department is one of just a few departments in the country that have behaved so poorly that they are under a “consent decree” from the Justice Department. For those who don’t know, a consent decree is a tool created to intervene in US Jurisdictions that actively harm civil rights. Since Seattle has a history of unusually racially inequitable and violent policing, the Seattle Police Department has been subject to a consent decree for over a decade.
And in fact, after years of efforts at reform and getting some parts of the decree lifted, the department is still under the thumb of the feds because of unusually poor crowd- management policies, weak accountability systems, and racial disparities in stops, detentions and use of force.
Regarding crowd management, a world renowned expert was brought in by the city to evaluate how the Seattle Police Department handled the 2020 protests. In his testimony he said, “The rapid deployment of munitions and the intensity of that deployment was really quite remarkable. [It is] very rare I've seen that level of use of force by any police force. In the world . . . Well, let me clarify. It's probably better to say I've never seen that level of intensity of use of munitions in as confined a geographical location in any other democratic state.”
So you know, one of the worst behaved in the country, one of the worst behaved in the world when it comes to democracies.
And Nelson and the Seattle City Council want to make sure it doesn’t get better.